KNOWLEDGE
FROM THE SEA
AFLOATING RUSSIAN city
block, the Akademik
Mstislav Keldysh holds
18 laboratories and 130 people,
including a joint Soviet-U. S.
scientific party of 65 and a crew
of technicians, cooks, and bottle
washers. Many of the crew are
women. Off Bermuda (below),
our motorized rubber dinghy
maneuvers to prepare Mir 1 for
its recovery.
The Keldysh is the flagship of
the Institute of Oceanology in
Moscow, headed by Vyacheslav
Yastrebov (right, at left), here
monitoring operations on deck.
The institute operates six
research vessels of similar size
and six smaller ones for the
Soviet Academy of Science.
Keldysh is air-conditioned
and quite luxurious. On its
globe-circling voyages the same
crew stays at sea for as long as
six months, returning to home
port in Kaliningrad only when
Keldysh does. Port stops are few
because foreign hotels and air
travel mean spending precious
hard currency, carefully hus
banded by the Soviet govern
ment. We must depend on the
Soviet airline, Aeroflot, to bring
a change of scientists. In con
trast, American oceanographers
sail on smaller ships, with scien
tists and crew coming aboard at
foreign ports on a brisk rota
tional basis.
As Moscow has shifted
toward a market economy, the
academy has made plans to con
tract research ships out for sci
entific use in order to earn that
hard currency and keep our